Published 4:00 am, Friday, March 3, 1995

With her clenched jaw, her world- weary face and a pair of eyes that say "I've seen it all,"
Rena Owen
seems born to play Beth, the battered, ultimately heroic Maori wife in "Once Were
Warriors
."

Owen may be the centerpiece in "Warriors," a New Zealand import opening today at Bay Area theaters, but she's not the film's only asset.

Lee Tamahori, a New Zealander who cut his teeth on TV commercials, makes his feature-film directing debut here, and delivers a movie that's lean, unsentimental and hard around the edges -- a gut- grabber that stays with you for days afterward.

Jim Carrey Under Fire for a Painting That Looks Like Sarah Huckabee SandersEntertainment Weekly

Set on the fringes of Auckland, where

low-income Maoris survive among barbed wire, noisy traffic, graffiti and limited options, "Once Were Warriors" is primarily a tale of domestic violence and child sexual abuse. It's the story of Beth; her husband, Jake (Temuera Morrison), a bellicose, sexually explosive brute who beats her when he drinks; and the five children she tries to save from him.

Early in "Warriors," Beth defies Jake's authority at a party in their home, and gets her head whomped. The next day, her face looks like rotting pulp. One eye is shut closed, the side of her face is swollen like an orange. "You look awful," Jake tells her with disgust. "Go clean yourself up."

Given that environment, it'll be a mira

cle if any of her kids turn out OK. Oldest son Nig (Julian Arahanga) is tight with a menacing, Maori gang whose tattoo-covered members look like comic-book mutations. Second son Boogie (Taungaroa Emile) is in trouble with the law, and gets remanded to a juvenile detention center.

The big question is oldest daughter Grace (Mamengaroa Kerr-Bell), and her prospects for outliving the abuse. A sensitive teenager who pours her heart into a poetry journal that she clutches to her chest, Grace embodies the future: She has the clearest sense of her father's weakness and the most contempt for her mother's inability to break loose.

STORY OF COURAGE

But "Warriors" is more than a problem drama about wife beaters, alcoholism and the tragedy of co-dependency. It's also, finally, a story of a woman struggling to claim her own courage, and a portrait of indigenous people living out the grim legacy of colonialism.

Maoris, a Polynesian group that came to New Zealand before and during the 14th century and defended themselves against British invaders in the century- long Maori Wars, today constitute 12 percent of the New Zealand population and 50 percent of the prison population. For the most part, they live on the margins of New Zealand society, ghettoized in the economic war zones that Tamahori depicts.

Indirectly, Tamahori turns the survival of Maori culture into a sub-theme. When Beth speaks of marrying Jake as a teenager, and shocking her upper-caste Maori family by taking up with a lower- caste Maori, she mourns the fact that Jake had no interest in keeping tradition alive. By staying with him, she realizes, she's deprived her children of the pride of cultural identity.

At times, "Warriors" is a hell-raising action film -- one that owes more to genremeisters Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill than it does to practitioners of tidy, European art cinema. Tamahori brings a slam-bang, tear-it-up feel to the scenes with the tattooed gangs -- and underlines the humor with a music track that mixes Polynesian, hip-hop, reggae and rap.

RAISES AWARENESS

In New Zealand, where Hollywood titles usually eclipse homegrown films, "Warriors" is a national sensation. It recently broke the all-time box-office record set by "Jurassic Park," and has had such wide-reaching influence that women's shelters and men-against-violence groups have multiplied to meet the demands of "Warriors"-induced awareness.

"Warriors" also has made stars out of Morrison, who's unforgettable as Jake, and Owen, who uses her fierce emotional power to transcend her limited technique (this was her second film).

Like Anna Magnani, the late Italian star, Owen has an elemental, dirt-under- the-fingernails quality -- a truthfulness in performance that's riveting.